Thing that may need to be done

[didou]

Lot of website actually link to the old forum http://realcent.forumco.com/

There is maybe a need to look at all the link and ask them to change their link for the new forum, so all new user will end up here, you can do it in Google Webmaster Tools https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ (need registration with google and a file on the server, may not be possible), the next best options to find them all is Yahoo Site Explorer :

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://realcent.forumco.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s
According to yahoo there is 1'916 link to the old website, that will generate a lot of traffic to the old forum and loose all these potential visitor and new members.

I see a lot of article written by jadedragon on external website that point to the old forum that could easily be changed.

Not sure if it's worth the time to do this, put just saying.

[uthminsta]

I was thinking something like this earlier. I found RealCent because of a link at Coinflation.com.

[JadeDragon]

I actually emailed Alex at coinflation to change the link earlier today and I'll be updating my links to realcent as well. Anyone willing to email other webmasters asking for link updates is more than welcome - we need all the help we can get with these tasks. One of the benefits of the new site is we can, for the first time, use webmaster tools.

That said, if you go to the old site it is pretty clear you need to head to realcent.org instead.

[uthminsta]

if you go to the old site it is pretty clear you need to head to realcent.org instead.

That's true. There's no mistaking it. You can almost see the tumbleweeds rolling across the old site already.

[didou]

That said, if you go to the old site it is pretty clear you need to head to realcent.org instead.

I agree with that, for human visitor it's nothing but a minor inconvenient.

But robots (crawler) like google and other search engine doesn't view and understand the web as we do. They won't catch up.
I'm about to get a little more technical here but there it is:

Best case scenario your page rank will sank because your inbounds link ratio to page/root link isn't high enough (lower than the older forum). That's mean no or very few visitor from organic search results. If you've got some they will end up in realcent.org and not the post they we're looking for, probably closing the page and search elsewhere.

Worst case scenario you will trigger a duplicate content flag inside search engine and may even get excluded from search engine results for that reason. That mean that even if you know the name realcent you may never be able to end up here. And as of today, for most people, if you aren't in google, you don't exist.

That may be a large amount of visitor looking for metal or advice and potentially some great new members that will be lost for that technical reason.

I think some admin know what i'm talking about here and like i say i don't know if it's worth the time or not. I think some major referral website (that can be view with the apache log if you don't have any statistics installed, not sure if you can do that with the old forum) need to be changed to the new forums and i believe that creating some link directly to post in the forums (or to a article in the wiki if that happen) instead of inbounds link to the root directory will solve this problem quickly.

I know some people may thing i push it a little too far, but i design quite a few website and i only try to think what best for the website. Moving here will have many (nasty?) side effects since we can't use a 301 (Moved Permanently) from the old forum.

[JadeDragon]

Yes this is the downside to moving the site but we could not control the old one properly so we had to night the bullet. Humans will find us and the bots are already crawling around here (we can see which ones are online now). There will be little duplicate content and links will get built here - including a bunch from old realcent.

Just for the record, here is the top 5 results on Google this AM for "Realcent"

Forum Moved to Realcent.org - Powered by ForumCo.com - The Forum ... (old realcent forum-clear to humans in Google we moved)
25 Apr 2010 ... To reduce clutter only threads authorized by Realcent Admin are allowed here. Ask first before posting a thread. Happy searching! ...
realcent.forumco.com/default.asp - Cached - Similar
Scrap Metal Salvage
Silver Bullion, Gold, & other Bullion ...
Copper Penny Bullion Investing
More results from forumco.com »

2. http://realcent.forumco.com - Copper Penny Bullion Investing ...
12 May 2006 ... Sticky: Metal composition of US cents by year.... realcent .... Non-Metals Necessities and Things To Think About, Realcent.forumco.com Operations and Policy ...
realcent.forumco.com/forum~FORUM_ID~1.asp - Cached - Similar
http://realcent.forumco.com - Non-Metals Necessities and Things To ...‎
Forum Moved to Realcent.org - Scrap Metal Salvage - Powered by ...‎
Forum Moved to Realcent.org - Silver Bullion, Gold, & other ...‎
More results from realcent.forumco.com »

3. realcent.friendpages.com (old realcent webpage for the site - no one can change this )
http://www.realcent.friendpages.com. Also, if you have a website or homepage, please put a link up to ... Click here for the NEW realcent message board! ...
www.realcent.friendpages.com/ - Cached

4. Realcent.org • Index page (Here)
9 Sep 2010 ... To reduce clutter only threads authorized by Realcent Admin are allowed here. Ask if you have an idea for a new tracking thread. ...
realcent.org/ - Cached

5. Realcent Just Makes Cents (an article I control)
17 Jan 2010 ... Realcent is a free forum that was started in 2006 by a couple guys interested in capturing the intrinsic value of the US copper penny. ...
www.xomba.com/realcent_just_makes_cents - Cached - Similar

Search "copper penny" and old realcent comes up but with the header "moved to realcent.org"

Also a number of other members have sites that link here. We are the place for copper bullion/copper pennies/Ni bullion on the net and we will be found.